Dead of Night (13 page)

Diaz opened his front door, sent his text, threw his cigarette butt on to the ground in front of him and looked across at
his Ford Focus, which was on the street. The bullet hit him right between the eyes and killed him instantly. The cigarette
butt, un-stamped-on, continued to smoulder long after Gerald Diaz had hit the ground.

‘Rita Addison,’ the attractive young black woman said to Çetin İkmen as she took his hand and gave it a vigorous shake. ‘I
work with Lieutenant Diaz.’

Diaz had told her to look out for the Turks and to take care of them until he arrived. It seemed the lieutenant had taken
a bit of a shine to poor old Zeke Goins’ ‘chosen’ people.

‘Çetin İkmen.’ İkmen shook back as hard as he could, but Addison was much younger, fitter and a lot taller then he was. He
wondered what Süleyman, who had just slipped out for a cigarette, would make of this Amazon.

‘From Turkey, right?’

‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘İstanbul.’

‘Ah.’

It was obvious she knew nothing about the city, so İkmen gave her a few facts.

‘Unlike Detroit, İstanbul is a growing city,’ he said. ‘Our citizens are now so numerous, nobody really knows how many we
are. Thirteen million? Fourteen? So many migrate from the countryside these days, it’s almost impossible to tell.’

Rita Addison’s eyes widened. ‘Wow!’

‘So we have a lot of problems,’ İkmen said. ‘Like Detroit, we have gangs, drugs, weapons on the streets. We also have foreign
gangs, as well as, of course, offences of terrorism.’

‘Tough crowd.’

‘You could say that.’ He smiled again.

Addison looked at her watch.

‘We’re supposed to eat at seven thirty, I think,’ İkmen said.

‘Yeah.’ She looked up. ‘Our Chief is coming, but he’s leaving it a bit snug, if you know what I mean.’

It was already seven fifteen, and as far as Addison could tell, Detroit’s Chief of Police had still not arrived. Then, within
seconds, the sound of sirens directly outside seemed to indicate that he had finally turned up. İkmen saw Süleyman, across
the reception area, go up and look at the dinner seating plan. Fortified by nicotine, he was probably looking forward to his
food. What Sergeant Ferrari called the ‘slop’ that was served to conference delegates during the course of the day was really
quite inedible, and so a lot of people, including the Turks, were hungry.

Minutes later, the Chief of Police, a broad, handsome black man, strode in, and for a moment, İkmen saw a grave if not frightened
expression pass across his features. Why he should be frightened around so many cops, people who were basically his ‘own’,
İkmen couldn’t imagine. For a few seconds, İkmen saw the Chief speak very earnestly to Lieutenant Shalhoub, and then the toastmaster
for the evening called for everyone to take their seats for dinner.

İkmen offered Rita Addison his arm. ‘I believe we are sitting together,’ he said.

She smiled and then laughed. Men didn’t offer her, or any other woman she knew, their arms very often. It was old-fashioned,
could be construed as sexist and just didn’t happen any more. But this man was a foreigner, and in his culture, she thought,
it was probably normal behaviour. So she took his arm and said, ‘Thank you.’

They began to move towards the entrance to the dining area. İkmen was aware that John Shalhoub was moving the other way, in
their general direction, but he didn’t know that he was actually coming over to speak. When he drew level with them, he said,
‘Rita, I need to talk to you.’

Just like the Chief’s, Shalhoub’s face was grave, his eyes shining with what looked like fear. Rita Addison frowned. ‘Can
it wait?’

‘No.’ He was very sure about that. It was a certainty that made İkmen feel a little cold.

Rita unthreaded her arm from İkmen’s and made her apologies. ‘I’ll see you at the table,’ she said. As İkmen made his way
towards the entrance to the dining room, he looked back once and saw her gasp in what looked like horror.

Where most non-blacks had fled the downtown area of Detroit years before, Gerald Diaz had stayed. There were a few people,
like him, of Mexican descent in the old Irish district of Corktown. And so he had stayed near to where he’d grown up and back
in the late 1970s had bought what was then a ruined Victorian worker’s cottage. Now he lay across its front step, his blood
and brains splattered across his doorstep and his small, neat front lawn.

An anonymous caller had alerted the Detroit PD to the body in the front yard of the pretty old house. But no one locally had
seen or heard anything. Two officers named Warwick and Kowalski had been first on the scene. When they’d realised who the
victim was, they’d called police headquarters. The Chief of Police, who had just been leaving his home to go to the international
conference dinner, had ordered the scene secured, personally called out the forensics team and immediately contacted Diaz’s
next of kin, his brother Ronaldo. Of course there was also Diaz’s ex-wife and his seventeen-year-old son Ernesto too. But
they lived in Mexico City, and so the Chief and Ronaldo agreed that Ronaldo should take the first flight down there and tell
them in person. Such news should not be given to a child about his parent over the phone.

As soon as he’d found out what had happened, John Shalhoub had immediately volunteered to head up the investigation. He and
Diaz had not been friends exactly, but they’d always respected each other. Rita Addison, still in her party dress and quite
naturally unable to eat in light of the news about her boss’s death, left the Cobo Center with Shalhoub. By the time they
arrived at the scene, the place was crawling
with forensic investigators as well as a group of uniformed officers that included Sergeant Donna Ferrari. Addison glanced
over at Diaz’s house beyond the incident tape, and her eyes were caught and held by the tent the forensic investigators had
now erected over the entrance. Gerald Diaz’s body was in there. She felt sick.

‘OK, Officer,’Donna Ferrari said to her, ‘let’s clear these bystanders out the way, shall we?’

People had gathered, materialised somehow from the boarded-up streets and the waste ground round and about. Attracted, as
people always were, by blood and disorder, they all stood in front of the tape and tried to see what was in the forensics
tent.

‘Unless they can tell us anything, they can all take a hike,’ Ferrari said. When Addison didn’t move, she shoved her. ‘Now,
Officer.’

‘Oh, er . . .’

For Rita it was like a dream, a hideous fantasy land from which, try as she might, she just couldn’t escape. Donna Ferrari
pulled her to one side, away from the gawping crowd as well as her fellow officers. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘we all liked Diaz,
OK? He was a good cop, a decent guy, and he always had your back. But there’s nothing any of us can do for him now except
catch the moron who killed him.’

Rita Addison looked at Donna Ferrari with tears in her eyes. ‘I know.’

‘So get on with it,’ Ferrari said. She walked over to the tape and shouted at the people outside it: ‘OK, this isn’t a sideshow,
move on!’

According to Lieutenant Shalhoub, the Chief was going to make Diaz’s killing number one priority. That was good, even if it
didn’t necessarily mean that they were going to discover who had killed him. Even cop-killers got away with it sometimes.

While Ferrari did what was turning out to be a very good job clearing people away from the scene, Rita made her way to the
tent that the forensics team had set up over Diaz’s body. When she pulled
the door flap to one side, she found herself looking right into Diaz’s shocked, smashed, blood-soaked face. She felt her stomach
turn immediately. Diaz had been her boss, her mentor, and at times her friend too. There had never been anything romantic
between them, but Rita at least had always hoped that one day that might change. She put her hand over her mouth and breathed
deeply. In spite of being appalled by what had happened to Diaz, she nevertheless couldn’t stop looking at him. Maybe it was
because she knew it could be the last time she ever would.

One of the forensics team, a woman called Rosa Guzman, looked up and said, ‘Hey, Addison, you know what Diaz was working on?’

Rosa could see that Rita was shocked, and she adopted a deliberately casual tone in an attempt to take the horror of it all
down a notch or two. It was something she’d done quite a few times before.

‘Oh, well . . .’

‘Lieutenant Shalhoub says he was on that drive-by over in Brush Park.’

‘Yes, he was. I am.’ Rita inhaled deeply again and then made herself look away from Diaz and over at Rosa Guzman.

‘Anything else?’

Rita, fighting the rising tide of sickness in her stomach, made herself think. ‘Well, he was talking at that conference at
the Cobo,’ she said.

‘Don’t think a bunch of out-of-towners would do this. Anything else?’

‘Yeah. There was one thing. He was looking into some old gang murder thing back in the 1970s.’

Something had been wrong at that dinner, but neither İkmen nor Süleyman knew what. Their host, the Chief of Detroit PD, had
been late, and then Rita Addison and Lieutenant Shalhoub, who were both supposed to have been on the Turks’ table, had disappeared.
Lieutenant Diaz hadn’t turned up at all.

‘They were kind of tense about something,’ Süleyman said as he
lit up a cigarette and sat down. They were back in their hotel suite after what had been a very nice meal, if one marred by
a strange atmosphere. ‘To me it felt rather similar to times when we’ve been waiting for some anticipated terrorist attack.
You know, when it might or equally might not happen, when you begin to question the quality of the intelligence that led up
to it.’

‘Indeed.’ İkmen also lit up a cigarette and sat down. ‘But then for all the new initiatives and development, this is still
a city with a lot of problems. If Detroit is indeed the future of post-industrial cities, then it does send a bit of a shudder
down the spine.’

‘Which is why, unlike you, I see a place for Zero Tolerance,’ Süleyman said. ‘Slum clearance . . .’

‘Slum clearance doesn’t work!’ İkmen said. ‘You know that! Look at what has happened since Fatih municipality demolished Sulukule
district. You, of all people, should know about that!’

Süleyman shot İkmen a furious glare. He had known the old gypsy quarter of Sulukule well because his ex-mistress, Gonca, had
been born there. Recently dismantled to make way for new housing, Sulukule’s once vibrant streets were now empty. The gypsies
who had danced, hawked and told fortunes there had moved on to sterile apartment complexes in the suburbs or, even less fortunately,
on to the streets. In spite of the death of Sulukule, the gypsies still danced, hawked their wares and told fortunes – they
just did those things elsewhere, often to the chagrin of İstanbul’s many tourist visitors.

‘Zero Tolerance just moves the problem on,’ İkmen said. ‘It also criminalises addiction, which should be a public-health issue
– in my opinion. I thought this conference was going to provide rather more alternative solutions than it has done, I must
say.’

‘Maybe, in spite of these gardening projects, clinics for junkies and what have you, Detroit has had to revisit Zero Tolerance
simply because of the size of the problem they face.’

İkmen sighed. ‘Maybe.’ Apart from Lieutenant Diaz and the
Antoine Cadillac initiative, he was rather disappointed in the conference so far. But then as he would have been the first
to admit, and for all their good intentions, police officers were generally fairly rigid in their thinking and in the range
of solutions they were prepared to employ.

İkmen put his hand in his jacket pocket and took out his mobile telephone. He’d switched it off just after they’d left the
hotel to go to dinner. Now he wondered if anyone back home had left any messages. He turned it on again.

Süleyman stretched, relaxed and then said, ‘I’m going to bed.’

It was only eleven thirty, but he was not dealing well with the jet lag or the cold and was still feeling almost as groggy
as he had done when they’d first arrived in the city.

‘OK.’

As İkmen peered at his phone, Süleyman got up to leave. ‘Good night.’

‘Good night.’

Süleyman went to his bedroom. İkmen’s phone beeped to let him know that he had a text message. He didn’t recognise the number
it had come from, but what he did know was that it was a local, US number. He scrolled through the menu to read the message.
When he got to it, there were only two words: ‘Got him.’

Got him? Got who? He called the number back and found himself talking to a Detroit Police Department Forensic Team officer
called Rosa Guzman.

‘Sergeant Farsakoğlu!’

‘Sir?’ She turned.

Ardıç didn’t often leave his office specifically to talk to individual officers – not unless they were of much higher rank
than Ayşe Farsakoğlu.

‘A moment in my office,’ he said.

She walked back down the corridor, entered his office and shut the door behind her. Although Ardıç, like everyone else, hadn’t
smoked in his office since the ban the previous July, a very faint whiff of tobacco smell suddenly caught Ayşe’s attention.
For just a moment, she wanted very desperately to start smoking again. But then the feeling passed, and once Ardıç had given
leave for her to do so, she sat down in the chair in front of his desk.

‘About your continuing interest in the movements of Ali Kuban,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘As you know, he has been under surveillance since his release. But due to the information you discovered on the internet,
we, or rather your colleagues in Vice, have identified some people of possible interest in his immediate vicinity. It would
seem that some like-minded creatures have managed, very recently, to arrange to lodge close to Mr Kuban.’

Ayşe frowned.

‘We are aware of the phenomenon whereby paedophiles like to group together and exchange pornography, information and sometimes
even victims, but a rapist?’ He shrugged. ‘A very famous and at one time violent rapist, I will grant you. Don’t know yet
if that is indeed what’s going on.’